An end of the year radical Black reading list from the editors of The Black Agenda Review.
Of the many, many books on Black history, culture, and society published in a given year, we often only learn about a small subset: about that grouping of texts more often than not written by self-promoting hustlers with the famous, name-brand friends, the expansive social media platforms and the incessant social media presence, and the access to those “good” (that is, white, liberal, mainstream) presses. These books are often known through sheer media saturation and that sprinkling of celebrity stardust, no matter the quality of the content, the form of the writing, or the nature of the politics. Indeed, even “radical” books by “radical” authors are launched into capitalism’s diamond-dusted dreamwold, begging a question concerning the definition of who or what is indeed a “radical.”
There are, of course, other Black books published: by Black publishers, by independent publishers, by non-Anglophone publishers, and by publishers outside of the United States. Many of these books don’t make the media rounds or the syllabi or the review lists as often as they should – and, for this reason, are not as well known as they should be. For the Black Agenda Review’s 2023 Radical Black Reading list, we’ve compiled a list of some of our favorites of these lesser-known but no less important works by radical writers, scholars, and activists. They’re all very good. Support the publishers. Support the authors. And make it your goal to read and share them in the new year.
Black Radical Reading, 2023, The Editors, Black Agenda Review
Anton de Kom and David McKay, We Slaves of Suriname (Polity Books).
Interest in the Surninamese anti-colonial writer and resistance fighter Anton de Kom has undergone a resurgence since 2020, buoyed by both the global Black Lives Matter protests and claims for reparations for slavery from the Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. De Kom was born in Paramaribo, Suriname, on February 22, 1898, thirty-five years after slavery had been officially abolished, but during a time when Black people lived in slavery-like conditions under Dutch colonial rule. In his book, Wij slaven van Suriname (We Slaves of Suriname), De Kom documented the long history of slavery in Suriname and the degraded and repressive conditions that Black people experienced in the decades following abolition. First published in a censored version in 1934 while De Kom was living in exile in the Netherlands, We Slaves of Suriname is a fierce but poetic critique of Dutch racism and colonialism. It should be read alongside classic anti-colonial tracts such as Aime Cesaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, especially now, as access to We Slaves of Suriname has been made easier with the arrival of a first English-language translation in 2022.
Merle Collins, Ocean Stirrings: A Work of Fiction in Tribute to Louise Langdon Norton Little, Working Mother and Activist, Mother of Malcolm X and Seven Siblings (Peepal Tree Press). Writer Merle Collins’ experimental biography of the life of the Grenada-born Garveyite Louise Little, perhaps best known as Malcolm X’s mom, is a brilliantly audacious and imaginative reconstruction of the history and interior life of a woman who is often little more than a footnote to historians, but whose story is one of Black struggle and resistance. A magnificent and moving work.
Yuliana Ortiz Ruano, Fiebre de carnaval (La Navaja Suiza). Hailing from Ecuador’s all-African Esmeraldas region, poet Yuliana Ortiz Ruano’s debut novel, Fiebre de carnaval (Carnival Fever), is a dynamic and vivacious story built around a Black girl’s experience of music, memory, and ritual. Unsentimental and feverishly smart Fiebre de carnaval tethers the history of slavery to the contemporary dispossession and discrimination faced by Afro-Equadorians.
Rodney Worrell, George Padmore's Black Internationalism (The University of the West Indies Press). Alongside Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois, George Padmore is one of the most important figures in the twentieth century history of Pan-Africanism. Padmore was one of the principal organizers of the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England, in 1945. He was the unheralded architect of African independence. And he was a significant theorist of colonial practice in Africa, and of Black anti-colonial resistance. Yet, scandalously, he is often erased from radical histories, his books remain out of print, and, until the recent publication of Rodney Worrell’s George Padmore's Black Internationalism, only two biographies of Padmore have been published since his death in 1959. Elegantly crafted and thoroughly researched, Worrell’s book is of signal importance in recovering Padmore’s life and work, and demonstrating his importance to Pan-African practice and Black self-determination.
Joan Flores-Villalobos, The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal (University of Pennsylvania Press). The story of the thousands of Black West Indian “silver men” – so-called because they were paid in silver and whites were paid in gold – who toiled in near-slavery like conditions to build the Panama Canal is, by now, largely well known. Less understood is the importance of Black women to the canal’s construction. In The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal Joan Flores-Villalobos recounts this history, focussing on the invisible labor and the everyday forms of social reproduction that were necessary for the building of the canal, and for the grim maintenance of US imperial infrastructure. It is a deeply researched, compellingly-written story of racial discrimination, segregation and exploitation, but also one of Black women’s subversion, survival, and community building.
Kevin Ochieng Okoth, Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics (Verso). In Red Africa philosopher Kevin Ochieng Okoth returns to the writings of twentieth century African revolutionaries, including Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, and Andrée Blouin to challenge the tired but persistent claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible – and that the writing of an older generation of African writers is irrelevant for the present moment. Okoth rejects the demobilizing cynicism of so-called “Afro-pessimism” and the anti-materialist anti-Marxism of so-called Black Marxists to argue that the anti-imperialist and international traditions of “Red Africa” are critical to a liberated African future.
Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy: Fort Mose, the Great Dismal Swamp, and the Human Quest for Freedom (On Our Own Authority! Publishing). For educator and organizer Modibo Kadalie, the maroon communities formed by African fugitives from slavery and indigenous resisters to genocide in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina and in Florida’s Fort Mose represent the best traditions of freedom, direct democracy, and radical autonomy. Kadalie’s latest book, recounts the centuries-long histories of these maroon geographies, making the powerful claim that they offer a compelling example of how to organize insurgent communities in the present day.
Anny-Dominique Curtius, Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée (Karthala). Suzanne Césaire (1915-1966) has long lived in the shadow of her husband, Martiniquan poet, politician, and playwright, Aimé Césaire. Yet Césaire, co-founder of the important anti-colonial journal Tropiques (1941-1945), was also an audacious and innovative author and critic in her own right. She was someone who influenced a host of other writers and artists in the Caribbean and beyond, including Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Duval Carrié, Daniel Maximin. In her rare and much-needed study, literary scholar Anny-Dominique Curtius revisits Suzanne Césaire’s work while both deciphering the traces of her presence in a range of later literary and artistic texts, and, through a methodology of textual archeology, examining the causes for the historical silence that have emerged around her work and person. Suzanne Césaire. Archéologie littéraire et artistique d'une mémoire empêchée is an important and original contribution to Caribbean and pan-African literary history.
Gerald Horne, I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader (OR Books), edited by Tionne Alliyah Parris. If you have trouble keeping up with the voluminous scholarly output by the people’s historian Gerald Horne, you are not alone. Two, sometimes, three, deeply researched books by the Professor seem to come out each year– and they are not thin and flimsy derivative studies but heavy, often four-hundred page doorstoppers that are original in examination and argumentation. For those of us unfortunate souls without the time to read a handful of Horne books a year, we are lucky to have the publication, I Dare Say: A Gerald Horne Reader – a comprehensive introduction to Horne’s work that demonstrates why he is the greatest radical historian living today.
Mentions:
Tchaiko Kwayana & Eusi Kwayana, Scars of Bondage: A First Study of the Slave Colonial Experience of Africans in Guyana (On Our Own Authority! Publishing). Merle Collins, The Colour of Forgetting (Peepal Tree Press). Grada Kilomba, Memorias de la plantación: Episodios de racismo cotidiano (Tinta Limon). Hamza Hamouchene and Katie Sandwell, editors. Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (Pluto Press). Gerald Horne, Revolting Capital: Racism & Radicalism in Washington, D.C., 1900-2000 (International Publishers). Iving Andre, The Mantle of Struggle, A Biography of Black Revolutionary Rosie Douglas (Between the Lines). Ishmael Reed, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (Dalkey Archive). Henry Tsang, White Riot: The 1907 Anti-Asian Riots in Vancouver (ArsenalPulp Press). Chris L. Terry and James Spooner, Black Punk Now (Soft Skull Press). Éric Morales-Franceschini, The Epic of Cuba Libre: The Mambí, Mythopoetics, and Liberation (University of Virginia Press). Chantal James, None But the Righteous (Counterpoint Press). Andre Bagoo, The Dreaming (Peepal Tree Press). Ashley Robertson Preston, Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist (University Press of Florida).
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